From the
Preface
| Hypnotized
as we are by the "inescapable" scientific
conditions of the present world, we have come
to believe that our hope lies in an ever
greater proliferation of machines, which will
see better than we do, hear better than we do,
calculate better than we do, heal better than
we do--and finally, perhaps, live better than
we do. |
"The age of adventures is over. Even
if we reach the seventh galaxy, we will go there
helmeted and mechanized, and it will not change a
thing for us; we will find ourselves exactly as we
are now: helpless children in the face of death,
living beings who are not too sure how they live, why
they are alive, or where they are going. On the
earth, as we know, the times of Cortez and Pizarro
are over; one and the same pervasive Mechanism
stifles us: the trap is closing inexorably. But, as
always, it turns out that our bleakest adversities
are also our most promising opportunities, and that
the dark passage is only a passage leading to a
greater light. Hence, with our backs against the
wall, we are facing the last territory left for us to
explore, the ultimate adventure:
ourselves.
Indeed, there are plenty of simple and obvious signs.
This decade's [the 60's] most important phenomenon is
not the trip to the moon, but the "trips" on drugs,
the student restlessness throughout the world, and
the great hippie migration. But where could they
possibly go?
There is no more room on the
teeming beaches, no more room on the crowded roads,
no more room in the ever-expanding anthills of our
cities. We have to find a way out
elsewhere.
But there are many kinds of "elsewheres." Those of
drugs are uncertain and fraught with danger, and
above all they depend upon an outer agent; an
experience ought to be possible at will, anywhere,
at the grocery store as well as in the solitude of
one's room--otherwise it is not an experience but
an anomaly or an enslavement. Those
of psychoanalysis are limited, for the moment,
to the dimly lit caves of the "unconscious," and
most importantly, they lack the agency of
consciousness, through which a person can be in
full control, instead of being an impotent witness
or a sickly patient.
Those of religion may be more
enlightened, but they too depend upon a god or a
dogma; for the most part they confine us in one type
of experience, for it is just as possible to be a
prisoner of other worlds as it is of this one--in
fact, even more so. Finally, the value of an
experience is measured by its capacity to transform
life; otherwise, it is simply an empty dream or an
hallucination.
Sri Aurobindo leads us to a twofold discovery, which
we so urgently need if we want to find an
intelligible meaning to the suffocating chaos we live
in, as well as a key for transforming our world. By
following him step by step in his prodigious
exploration, we are led to the most important
discovery of all times, to the threshold of the Great
Secret that is to change the face of this world,
namely, that consciousness is power.
Hypnotized as we are by the
"inescapable" scientific conditions of the present
world, we have come to believe that our hope lies in
an ever greater proliferation of machines, which will
see better than we do, hear better than we do,
calculate better than we do, heal better than we
do--and finally, perhaps, live
better than we do. Indeed, we must first
realize that we can do better than our machines, and
that the enormous Mechanism that is suffocating us is
liable to collapse as quickly as it came into being,
provided we are willing to seize on the true power
and go down into our own hearts, as methodical,
rigorous, and clearheaded explorers.
| "I become
what I see in myself. All that thought suggests
to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in
me, I can become. This should be man's
unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells
in him." |
Then we may discover that our
splendid twentieth century is still the Stone Age of
psychology, that, in spite of all our science, we
have not yet entered the true science of living, the
real mastery of the world and of ourselves, and that
there lie before us horizons of perfection, harmony
and beauty, compared to which our most superb
scientific discoveries are like the roughcasts of an
apprentice.
"I become what I see in myself. All
that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that
thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be
man's unshakable faith in himself, because God
dwells in him."
From the Introduction...
There once was a wicked Maharaja who
could not bear to think that anyone was superior to
him. So he summoned all the pandits of the realm, as
was the practice on momentous occasions, and put to
them this question: "Which of us two is greater, I or
God?" The pandits began to tremble with fear. Being
wise by profession, they asked for time; they were
also concerned for their positions and their lives.
Yet, they were worthy men who did not want to
displease God. As they were lamenting their
predicament, the oldest pandit reassured them: "Leave
it to me. Tomorrow I shall speak to the Prince." The
next day, the whole court was gathered in a solemn
durbar when the old pandit quietly arrived, his hands
humbly joined together, his forehead smeared with
white ashes. He bowed low and spoke these words: "O
Lord, undoubtedly thou art the greater." The Prince
twirled his long moustache thrice and tossed his head
high. "Thou art the greater, King, for thou canst
banish us from thy kingdom, whilst God cannot; for
verily, all is His kingdom and there is nowhere to go
outside Him."
This Indian tale, which comes
from Bengal, where Sri Aurobindo was born, was not
unknown to him who said that all is He--gods,
devils, men, the earth, not just heaven--and whose
entire experience leads to a divine rehabilitation
of matter.
For the last half century,
psychology has
done nothing but reinstate the demons in man;
it is possible, as André Malraux believed,
that the task of the next half century will be "to
reinstate the gods in man," or, rather, as Sri
Aurobindo put it, to reinstate the Spirit in man
and in matter, and to create "the life divine on
earth":
The heavens beyond are great and
wonderful, but greater yet and more wonderful are
the heavens within you. It is
these Edens that await the divine worker.
There are many ways to set out to
work; each of us has, in fact, his or her own
particular approach: for one it may be a well-crafted
object or a job well done; for another a beautiful
idea, an encompassing philosophical system; for still
another a piece of music, the flowing of a river, a
burst of sunlight on the sea; all are ways of
breathing the Infinite. But these are brief moments,
and we seek permanence. These are moments subject to
many uncontrollable conditions, and we seek something
inalienable, independent of conditions and
circumstances--a window within us that will never
close again.
And since those conditions are difficult to meet here
on earth, we speak of "God," of "spirituality," of
Christ, of Buddha, and the whole lineage of great
religious founders; all are ways of finding
permanence. But it may be that we are not religious
or spiritual men, but just men, tired of dogmas, who
believe in the earth and who are suspicious of big
words. We also may be somewhat weary of too much
intelligent thinking; all we want is our own little
river flowing into the Infinite. There was a great
saint in India who, for many years before he found
peace, used to ask whomever he met: "Have you seen
God? Have you seen God?" He would always go away
frustrated and angry because people told him stories.
He wanted to see. He wasn't wrong, considering all
the deception men have heaped onto this world, as
onto many others. Once we have seen, we can talk
about it; or, most probably, we will remain silent.
Indeed, we do not want to deceive ourselves with
words; we want to start from what we have, right
where we are, with our cloddy shoes and the little
ray of sunshine on the good days; such is our simple
hearted faith.
We see that the world around us is
not so great, and we aspire for it to change, but we
have become wary of universal panaceas, of movements,
parties, and theories. So we will begin at square
one, with ourselves such as we are; it isn't much,
but it's all we have. We will try to change this
little bit of world before setting out to save the
other. And perhaps this isn't such a foolish idea
after all; for who knows whether changing the one is
not the most effective way of changing the other?
What can Sri Aurobindo do for us at this low
altitude?
There is Sri Aurobindo the philosopher, and Sri
Aurobindo the poet, which he was essentially,
a visionary
of evolution; but not everyone is a philosopher
or a poet, much less a seer. But would we not be
content if he gave us a way to believe in our own
possibilities, not only our human but our superhuman
and divine possibilities, and not only to believe in
them but to discover them ourselves, step by step, to
see for ourselves and to become vast, as vast as the
earth we love and all the lands and all the seas we
hold within us? For there is Sri Aurobindo the
explorer, who was also a yogi; did he not say that
yoga is the art of conscious
self-finding?
It is this exploration of
consciousness that we would like to undertake with
him. If we proceed calmly, patiently, and with
sincerity, bravely facing the difficulties of the
road--and God knows it is rugged enough--there is no
reason that the window should not open at some point
and let the sun shine on us forever. Actually, it is
not one but several windows that open one after
another, each time on a wider perspective, a new
dimension of our own kingdom; and each time it means
a change of consciousness as radical as going from
sleep to the waking state. We are going to outline
the main stages of these changes of consciousness, as
Sri Aurobindo experienced them and described them to
his disciples in his integral yoga, until they take
us to the threshold of a new, still unknown
experience that may have the power to change life
itself.
For Sri Aurobindo is not only the explorer of
consciousness, he is the builder of a new world.
Indeed, what is the point of changing our
consciousness if the world around us remains as it
is? We would be like Hans Christian Andersen's
emperor walking naked through the streets of his
capital. Thus, after exploring the outermost
frontiers of worlds that were not unknown to ancient
wisdom, Sri Aurobindo discovered yet another world,
not found on any map, which he called the Supermind
or Supramental, and which he sought to draw down upon
Earth. He invites us to draw it down a little with
him and to take part in the beautiful story, if we
like beautiful stories.
For the Supermind, Sri Aurobindo
tells us, brings a dramatic change to the evolution
of consciousness on earth; it is the change of
consciousness that will have the power to hope--as
thoroughly and lastingly as the Mind did when it
first appeared in living matter. We will see,
therefore, how the integral yoga leads to a
supramental yoga, or yoga of terrestrial
transformation, which we will try to outline only,
because the story is still in the making; it is quite
new and difficult, and we do not quite know yet where
it will take us, or even whether it will succeed.
That, in fact, depends a little upon us all..."
From Chapter 3 - The
Last of the Intellect
| "The
capital period of my intellectual development,"
confided Sri Aurobindo to a disciple, "was when
I could see clearly that what the intellect
said might be correct and not correct, that
what the intellect justified was true and its
opposite also was true. I never admitted a
truth in the mind without simultaneously
keeping it open to the contrary of it.... And
the first result was that the prestige of the
intellect was gone!" |
It had taken Sri Aurobindo fourteen
years to cover the road of the West; it was to take
him almost as much time to cover the path of India
and to attain the "summit" of the traditional yogic
realisations, that is, the starting point of his own
work. But what is interesting for us is that even
this traditional road, which we must look upon as a
preparation, Sri Aurobindo traversed outside all
customary rules, as a freelance or rather as an
explorer who cares little for precautions and for
maps and thus avoids many useless windings because he
has simply the courage to go straight ahead.
It was then not in solitude nor with
legs crossed nor under the guidance of an enlightened
Master that Sri Aurobindo was to begin the journey
but as we might do ourselves, without knowing
anything about it, right in the midst of life - a
life as tumultuous and disturbed as ours may be - and
all alone.
The first secret of Sri Aurobindo is
undoubtedly to have always refused to cut life into
two - action, meditation, inner, outer, and all the
gamut of our false separations; from the day he
thought of yoga he put everything into it: high and
low, within, without, all was good enough for him,
and he started off without a look behind. Sri
Aurobindo has not come to give us a demonstration of
exceptional qualities in an exceptional milieu, he
has come to show us what is possible for man and that
the exceptional is only a normality not yet mastered,
even as the supernatural, he said, is that the nature
of which we have not attained or do not yet know, or
the means of which we have not yet conquered.'
Fundamentally, everything in this world is a question
of right concentration; there is nothing which will
not finally yield up to a well-directed
concentration.
When he landed at the Apollo Bunder in Bombay a
spontaneous spiritual experience seized him, a vast
calm took possession of him; but he had other
problems: food, living. Sri Aurobindo was twenty. He
found a job with the Maharaja of Baroda as professor
first of French, then of English, at the State
College of which he soon became VicePrincipal. He
also worked as the private secretary of the Prince.
Between the Court and the College his hands were
already full, but it was the destiny of India which
preoccupied him. He went several times to Calcutta,
acquainted himself with the political situation,
wrote articles which created a sensation, for he was
not satisfied with calling the queen-empress of India
an old lady so called by way of courtesy he invited
his compatriots to shake off the British yoke and
attacked the mendicant policy of the Indian Congress:
no reforms, no collaboration.
His aim was to organise all the
energies of the nation for a revolutionary action.
This must have required some courage in 1893 when the
British hegemony extended over three-fourths of the
globe. But Sri Aurobindo had a special way of
attacking the problem; he did not lay the blame upon
the English but upon the Indians themselves: Our
actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves,
but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our
purblind sentimentalism.$ Here is already a dominant
note of Sri Aurobindo who, in the political battle as
in the spiritual and in all circumstances, asks us to
search within ourselves and not outside or elsewhere
for the causes of our misfortunes and of the
calamities of the world; outer circumstances are
merely the unfolding of what we are, said later she
who shared his work.
Sri Aurobindo soon realised that newspaper
articles did not suffice to awaken a country; he
began underground work which was to lead him to the
threshold of the gallows. For thirteen years Sri
Aurobindo was to play with fire.
However, this young man was neither agitated nor
fanatical: "His smile was simple like that of a
child, as limpid and as sweet," wrote his Bengali
teacher who lived with him for two years (Sri
Aurobindo had naturally begun to study his
mother-tongue), and with a touching naivety his
teacher adds:
"Before meeting Sri Aurobindo I had
imagined him as a stalwart figure dressed like a
European from head to foot, immaculate, with a stern
look behind his spectacles, a distorted accent (of
Cambridge, evidently!) and a temper exceedingly
rough.... Who could have thought that this bronzed
young man with the soft and dreamy eyes and long wavy
hair parted in the middle and falling to the neck,
clad in a common coarse Ahmedabad dhoti and a
close-fitting Indian jacket, on his feet
old-fashioned slippers with upturned toes, and the
face slightly marked with small-pox, was no other
than Mister Aurobindo Ghose, a living well of French,
Latin and Greek?"
For the rest, Sri Aurobindo was not yet through with
books, the occidental momentum was still there; by
huge cases he devoured books ordered from Bombay and
Calcutta: "Aurobindo would sit at his work-table,"
continues his Bengali teacher, "and read in the light
of an oil lamp till one in the morning, oblivious of
the intolerable mosquito-bites. I would see him
seated there in the same posture, for hours on end,
his eyes fixed on the book, like a yogi plunged in
the contemplation of the Divine, lost to all that
went on around. Even if the house had caught fire, it
would not have broken this concentration."
Novels, English, Russian, German, French, filed past
him thus and also in ever larger numbers the sacred
books of India, the Upanishads, the Gita, the
Ramayana, without his having ever stepped into a
temple save through curiosity. "Once having returned
from College," narrates one of his friends, "Sri
Aurobindo sat down, picked up a book at random and
began to read it whilst Z and some friends began a
noisy game of chess. After half an hour he put down
his book and took a cup of tea. We had already seen
him do this many a time and were waiting eagerly for
a chance to verify whether he read the books from
cover to cover or whether he only skimmed through a
few pages here and there.
The test began immediately. Z opened
the book, read a line aloud and asked Sri Aurobindo
to repeat the sequel. Sri Aurobindo concentrated for
a moment and repeated the entire page without a
single mistake. If he could read a hundred pages in
half an hour, no wonder he could read a caseful of
books in so incredibly short a time." But Sri
Aurobindo did not stop at the translations of the
sacred texts, he began to study Sanskrit which he
learnt by himself- a fact typical of him: indeed a
thing had but to be considered difficult or
impossible, and he refused to take anyone's word for
it, be he grammarian, pandit or clergyman, and wished
to make the experiment himself, directly. This method
possibly had advantages, for not only did he learn
Sanskrit but discovered a few years later the lost
meaning of the Vedas (The Vedic Age, prior to that of
the Upanishads, which was its heir, may be placed
before 4000 B.C)
The day came, however, when Sri Aurobindo had had
enough of these intellectual gymnastics. Probably he
had seen that one can continue indefinitely to amass
knowledge and to read and read and to learn the
languages, even all the languages in the world and
all the books in the world, and yet not advance an
inch.
For the mind does not seek to know
truly, though it seems to - it seeks to grind. Its
need of knowledge is primarily a need of something to
grind. And if perchance the machine were to come to a
stop because the knowledge was found, it would
quickly rise in revolt and find something new to
grind, to have the pleasure of grinding and grinding:
This is its function. That within us which seeks to
know and to progress is not the mind but something
behind it which makes use of it:
"The capital period of my
intellectual development," confided Sri Aurobindo
to a disciple, "was when I could see clearly that
what the intellect said might be correct and not
correct, that what the intellect justified was true
and its opposite also was true. I never admitted a
truth in the mind without simultaneously keeping it
open to the contrary of it.... And the first result
was that the prestige of the intellect was
gone!"
Sri Aurobindo had come to a
turning-point; the temples did not interest him and
the books were empty. A friend advised him to
practise yoga, Sri Aurobindo refused: A yoga which
requires me to give up the world is not for me; he
even added, a solitary salvation leaving the world to
its fate was felt as almost distasteful.
But one day Sri Aurobindo witnessed a
curious scene, though one quite common in India; yet
banality is often the best pretext for an inner
starting-point. His brother Barin had fallen ill
having caught a dangerous hill-fever (Barin was born
when Sri Aurobindo was in England; it was he who
served as Sri Aurobindo's secret messenger for the
organisation of the Indian resistance in Bengal),
when there arrived one of those half-naked wandering
monks, smeared with ashes, who are called
naga-sannyasins. He was perhaps on his way begging
food from door to door as is their custom, when he
saw Barin rolled up in his bed-sheets, shivering with
fever. Without a word he asked for a glass of water,
cut it through cross-wise with a knife while he
chanted a mantra, and gave it to the sick man to
drink. Five minutes later Barin was cured and the
monk had disappeared.
Sri Aurobindo had heard much about
the strange powers of these ascetics but this time he
had seen with his own eyes. He felt then that yoga
could serve other ends than mere escape. Now, he had
need of power to liberate India:
"The agnostic was in me, the
atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was
not absolutely sure that there was a God at all....
I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in
this yoga.... So when I turned to the yoga and
resolved to practise it and find out if my idea was
right, I did it in this spirit and with this prayer
to Him, "If Thou art, then Thou knowest my heart.
Thou knowest that I do not ask for Mukti
(liberation), I do not ask for anything which
others ask for. I ask only for strength to uplift
this nation, I ask only to be allowed to live and
work for this people whom I love.."
It was thus that Sri Aurobindo set
out.
